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By Alan Boyle - cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com

Experts are still analyzing their newly made 3-D maps of the Titanic shipwreck site, but they can already see that the great ship’s breakup was messier than most folks, including "Titanic" film director James Cameron, may have thought. “It wasn’t quite the way Cameron showed it in his movie,” expedition co-leader Dave Gallo observed.

In a post-expedition interview, Gallo said the fates of the 1,517 people who died in the 1912 tragedy were never far from his mind — especially when a doll’s arm turned up on the HD video from the seafloor.

Gallo and his colleagues spent weeks sailing back and forth between the research vessel Jean Charcot's port in St. John's, Newfoundland, and the North Atlantic spot where the Titanic went down. The expedition was interrupted by two hurricanes, Danielle and Igor, leading to last week's earlier-than-expected end.

Gallo, a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, said he considered this the first purely scientific mission to the Titanic since the original survey of the site in the mid-1980s. Numerous voyages have been conducted in the intervening quarter-century, but "all of those have had science as a sidebar," Gallo told me.

"The primary mission of most of those was either recovery of artifacts, by RMS Titanic, or adventure tourism, with Deep Ocean Adventures," he observed. "Sure, they all came back with exciting images, but was that science? No."

Chris Davino, president of RMS Titanic Inc., said the past month's expedition was aimed at bringing together experts in deep-sea diving and salvaging with the scientific experts from Woods Hole, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and elsewhere. "It resonated more with me when I was out there that what we did will have real implications for deep-sea exploration and wreck-site archaeology," Davino told me. "The tools that these experts brought to bear are game-changing."

The expedition's primary aim was to use robotic vehicles equipped with cameras and sonar devices to create unprecedented maps of the Titanic. The survey covereed a 3-by-5-mile area — with high-resolution, 3-D mapping of the central 1-by-1.5-mile box. "We achieved our primary objective," Davino said.

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By Fabio Esteban Amador - Natgeo Newswatch

2010 marks the 50th anniversary of George Bass's first-ever submarine mapping and excavation of a complete shipwreck and the dawn of modern underwater archaeology.

Transoceanic explorers throughout time have traveled in relatively fragile vessels, often carrying their personal belongings, items that reflect who they are and where they are from.

Their ships transported resources, tools, knowledge and technologies. They traveled near and far, reaching across the blue horizon, discovering new lands, claiming natural wonders and even civilizations.

Our ancestors viewed the oceans as the means to reach the unknown and all its fortunes, but the oceans were not always easily traveled and from time to time they unleashed their temper on the vessels and maritime peoples who suffered its plunder.

So, if our planet is mostly covered by the oceans then the oceans may hold thousands of sites, artifacts, ships, and histories of peoples and civilizations that had a unique interaction and relation to the sea.

This potential archaeology was inaccessible for a long time and beyond anyone's imagination. However, it was just a matter of time before a unique and inspiring individual came along and began the age of underwater archaeology.

George Bass, a University of Pennsylvania archaeology graduate student, was asked in 1960 if he would be interested in studying a Late Bronze Age shipwreck off the coast of Turkey. "I had never dived except once in a YMCA swimming pool before leaving for Turkey in 1960," George explains. His desire to explore and document the ocean's floor became the foundation for what now is the field of underwater and maritime archaeology.

Dating to over 3,000 years old, the first shipwreck studied by George Bass was at the time the oldest ship ever found. His research at Cape Gelidonya would be like none that came before - it would literally change our notions of archaeology and the ocean forever.

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By Scott Pickey - Wwaytv3

Three hundred years on the ocean floor can be pretty rough on a body.

The Underwater Archaeology Branch (UAB) of the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources will dedicate its fall dive to treating some large bodies of iron in the Atlantic Ocean. Researchers, from Sept. 22-Oct. 29, will be on wreck site of the likely Queen Anne’s Revenge (QAR), Blackbeard’s flagship, which sank in 1718 near Beaufort.

They will try to change the electrochemical process that corrodes iron in saltwater by applying anodes, skinny aluminum rods, to the objects as they are in situ (in the original place).

A dozen cannons, 6 feet to 8 feet long and weighing 700 pounds to 1 ton, will undergo the treatment. So will three large anchors, 11 feet to 13 feet long and weighing an estimated 1,800 pounds.

“It’s imperative that we stop the damaging effects of salt water on these treasures,” says QAR Archaeological Field Director Chris Southerly. “This is a good alternative to help stabilize them when in laboratory space is not available.”

The archaeologists will work in the mid-ship area and are completing full recovery at the shipwreck site. To date, more than 700,000 artifacts have been recovered.

Many are undergoing conservation at the QAR Conservation Laboratory at East Carolina University in Greenville. Others are exhibited at the N.C. Maritime Museum in Beaufort, the repository for QAR artifacts.

Water and wind conditions will affect greatly the on-site work. Ocean swells can delay diving, and already Hurricanes Igor and Julia are roiling the seas. Currently the water temperature of a favorable 79° is more appealing than the 10° cooler of late October.

The shipwreck was located in 1996 by Intersal, Inc. of Florida by Operations Director Mike Daniel through research provided by Intersal president Phil Masters.

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By Michael Hanlon - Daily Mail

Five thousand fathoms under the waves, a deafening clang rang out through the cramped, freezing submarine, causing the whole vessel to shake like a leaf.

Squinting through their tiny Plexiglas window into the abyss, the two explorers’ hearts missed a beat. 

‘It was a pretty hairy experience,’ they said afterwards with some understatement. The outer layer of their porthole had cracked under the unimaginable weight of six miles of seawater — and they still had more than a mile to descend. 

Fortunately, their so-called ‘bathyscaphe’ submarine, an extraordinary piece of Swiss-Italian-German engineering, sustained no further damage, and the explorers — Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh — lived to tell the extraordinary tale of this unique descent.

Twelve men have walked on the surface of the Moon and maybe 500 have travelled into space, but only Piccard and Walsh have visited the very deepest point of the ocean, which they reached on January 23, 1960.

The Challenger Deep dive was one of the most extraordinary — and surprisingly little known — feats of human exploration in history, the voyage in a submarine to a place even more extreme than the surface of most planets.

Now it has been announced that the multi-Oscar-winning film director James Cameron plans to add his name to the very exclusive club of those who have travelled to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, part of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific, and the deepest known point in the world’s oceans.

Cameron — who, after all, made a fortune with Titanic — plans a follow-up to his billion-dollar 3D blockbuster Avatar, this time set in the teeming oceans of the film’s fictional alien planet of Pandora.

And last weekend it was reported that he has commissioned a bespoke submarine, built of high-tech, man-made composite materials and powered by electric motors, which will be capable of surviving the tremendous pressures at a depth of seven miles, from which he will shoot 3D footage that may be incorporated in Avatar’s sequel.

It seems bizarre that no one has repeated the feat of Piccard and Walsh in more than half a century (two unmanned submersible robots have made the trip since). But then no one has to date built a working replacement for their vessel, the Trieste.

Designed by Challenger Deep pilot Jacques Piccard’s father, the Swiss scientist Auguste Piccard, and mostly built in Italy, the Trieste, which was bought by the U.S. Navy in 1958, is a truly extraordinary vessel.

Most deep-diving craft up to that point (and, indeed, up to today) were tethered vessels, linked to their ‘motherships’ on the surface by steel cables and umbilical cords to aid breathing.

The 50ft-long Trieste was, in contrast, a wholly self-contained submarine, free-diving and with its own life-support systems. It was not attached to the surface in any way during its extraordinary five-hour descent to the ocean floor.

The Trieste in some ways resembled an underwater airship. It consisted of two parts: a huge cigar-shaped ‘balloon’ filled with 22,500 gallons of petrol to provide buoyancy (petrol is lighter than water).

Attached underneath this balloon was a tiny steel sphere, manufactured by Krupp of West Germany, just 7ft across, into which the pilots were crammed.

Effectively, it worked like a hot air balloon underwater, since the petrol in the balloon was incompressible, unlike air. So even at great pressure, the petrol balloon kept its shape and the craft remained buoyant.

But if the petrol in the balloon was lighter than water, how did the submarine descend ?

Nine tons of iron pellets were attached to the craft to make it sink — and when the pilots wanted to ascend again, they were jettisoned on to the ocean floor.

During the dive, temperatures in the dank, unheated pressure sphere fell to a few degrees above zero, and the shivering pilots ate chocolate bars to conserve their strength.

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By Randy Boswell - Montreal Gazette

A British adventurer has piqued the interest of the Canadian government after reporting the discovery of skeletal human remains on a small, unnamed island in Arctic waters close to where members of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition are known to have disappeared more than 160 years ago.

Bear Grylls, star of the popular Man vs. Wild outdoor survival TV series, claims to have found bones, charred wood and other artifacts earlier this month during a charity-fundraising expedition to cross the Northwest Passage in a rigid inflatable boat.

At the expedition website, Grylls described how he and his team members discovered the remnants of a mysterious campsite on Sept. 2 on an tiny island in Wellington Strait east of King William Island — the place where some of the survivors from Franklin’s ice-locked ships Erebus and Terror took shelter in the late 1840s before they eventually succumbed to cold and starvation.

“We found the rocky outline of a grave set by some stranded visitor long ago,” Grylls wrote at his expedition blog. “And at the grave, we saw bones. And a small piece of felt or fabric. And then as we looked there was another grave.

And another, and a fourth.”

Such sites are not unheard of among Canada’s Arctic islands, where extreme cold and dry conditions can preserve archeological remains intact for generations or even centuries.

Graves from the Franklin Expedition have previously been found. In the 1980s, scientists even studied the frozen corpse of one of Franklin’s doomed sailors and shed light on the possible lead poisoning of the crew because of improperly tinned foods.

But it wasn’t immediately clear if the graves reported by Grylls had been previously documented by Nunavut or federal heritage officials.

Marc-Andre Bernier, chief of underwater archeology at Parks Canada, told Postmedia News on Sunday that he was aware of the reported discovery but reluctant to comment in detail because “we haven’t seen anything yet.”

By Robert Reid - The Record

The Titanic has docked in downtown Kitchener.

Most people know about the “unsinkable” steamship sinking after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic, even if they don’t know the date — April 15, 1912.

Thanks to The Museum, history and mystery collide with an exhibition of more than 150 artifacts recovered from the world’s most famous shipwreck.

Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition is being unveiled Thursday at an invitation-only gala. It opens to the public Friday and continues through Jan. 23. Presented by Atlanta-based RMS Titanic Inc., the largest exhibition in The Museum’s eight-year history is expected to draw record crowds.

During the past 15 years, international touring exhibitions have attracted more than 22 million spectators. The only company licensed to recover objects from the wreckage has salvaged more than 5,500 artifacts during seven expeditions between 1987 and 2004. Titanic would be impressive were the exhibition simply a collection of artifacts.

But it is more — much more. It’s the compelling human drama told through the artifacts that makes the exhibition so deeply moving and memorable.

Many artifacts stop you in your tracks. A display of white plates recovered from the ocean’s floor resembles the headstones of unnamed soldiers in the cemeteries.

Spread over two floors, the multimedia exhibition spans the inception and construction of the ship through its fateful voyage and aftermath, including recovery and conservation operations.

After receiving replicas of boarding passes of actual passengers, gallerygoers travel back in time and experience what it was like aboard ship through the use of full-scale, facsimile installations.

They even get up-close and personal with an iceberg. Gallerygoers gain insight into the science and technology pertaining to the ship. But it’s the stories of heroism and loss, which put a human face on the ill-fated ocean liner, that strike the deepest chords.

This installment of Titanic features some never-before-shown postcards with Canadian connections. The Museum has partnered with a couple of area institutions. The Fashion History Museum is loaning period clothing, while the Stratford Perth Museum is loaning period luggage.

The Museum is also partnering with the Grand River Film Festival and Princess Cinema to present a film series, including the screening of James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster. There will also be a mini-lecture series.

According to the old TV show Star Trek, the intergalactic reaches of outer space constitute the last frontier. But anyone experiencing Titanic might argue that the last frontier is closer to home — the deepest reaches of the oceans that cover 71 per cent of the planet.

The sinking of the state-of-the-art ship continues to resonate after nearly a century because it is a case of history transcending time and place and becoming symbolic.

The story of the Titanic encapsulates the story of the 20th century. The event symbolizes the elemental conflict between humanity and nature. Humanity is constantly at the losing end of nature’s wrath, whether the tsunami in Southeast Asia, Hurricane Katrina or the recent earthquake in Haiti.

Similarly, there is a religious dimension to the sinking of the Titanic. The Judeo-Christian tradition holds that humanity has dominance over nature, despite evidence to the contrary.

The event is tragic in the common sense of the word because of the loss of life, not to mention the suffering and grief it caused. It is also tragic in the Shakespearean sense because of the narrative that developed contending that it resulted from a human flaw — hubris or arrogance.

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By Dominic Feain - Northern Star

The mystery shipwreck discovered at Lighthouse Beach in Ballina last week may be one of five steamships that came to grief in the area, experts say.

News of the discovery has spread, exciting more than just local shipwreck spotters. Experts from Sydney plan to inspect the site next week if conditions are favourable.

Heavy seas expected this weekend may scuttle hopes of identifying the wreck before it is reclaimed by the ever shifting sea floor.

Tim Smith, deputy director of the Heritage branch of the NSW Department of Planning, which runs NSW's shipwreck program, said he had put his money on itbeing the ill-fated Tomki that met its demise on the northern side of the Richmond River entrance on September 14, 1907.

But Clem McMahon, from the Ballina Naval Museum, was keeping an open mind as divers had spotted remnants of the Tomki further north along the beach.

“These sightings provide rare glimpses into the past,” Mr Smith said. “It's a really exciting story and follows on from the seven coastal shipwrecks that became exposed on NSW coastal beaches for a short period last year.”

Mr Smith said parts of the Tomki had been exposed before in the same general location, making it the likely candidate.

“But we can't rule out that itrepresents another local wreck site at this stage,” he said, adding he wouldn't ever rule out anunknown discovery.

“Many wrecks lie buried under the adjacent beaches and some 87 vessels were wrecked in or around the dangerous Richmond River entrance from the 1900s.”

Mr Smith said that the wreck was likely to be protected, attracting penalties up to $1.1 million for any disturbance to the site, although divers and beach-goers were free to view the wreck.

LIKELY SHIPWRECKS:

Culloden 1872, Francis Hixson 1883, Lady Musgrave 1904, Waimea 1872, Tomki 1907

By Jim Burnett - National Parks  Traveler

A Hollywood writer would love this plot…but it's true.

The "largest, most advanced aircraft of its day," modified for a secret research mission, takes off for a flight over the desert. Painted on its nose are the words, "Cosmic Ray Research."

The plane ends up at the bottom of one of the largest man-made lakes in the world, Lake Mead, where the wreck becomes a prized find for underwater archeologists.

The plane was a B-29 Superfortress, one of the last built near the end of World War II at the Boeing plant in Wichita, Kansas. This particular aircraft underwent modifications in 1947 to transform it from a weapon of war to a flying laboratory for Project Apollo, a joint Army/Navy Cold War research program.

On July 21, 1948, the aircraft took off from its base in California and headed east over the desert. It was on a special military mission to conduct atmospheric research using a then top secret instrument called the “sun tracker” that was installed on the plane—hence the words "Cosmic Ray Research" painted on its nose.

The mission required runs at altitudes ranging from 30,000 feet to "as low as possible."

While the plane was making a low run over Lake Mead, something went awry. The pilot later reported, “The water was very calm. Surface was absolutely smooth,” when the plane struck the surface of the lake. The landing must have been quite a ride for those on board: according to one account, when the plane hit the water, three of the four engines were torn off and the plane "skipped like a stone for more than a quarter mile."

All five men aboard the aircraft escaped into life rafts before the plane sank to the bottom of Lake Mead. The crew members were rescued by local boaters, and the plane remains where it sank, under about 170 feet of water. Its location was an intriguing mystery for over 50 years; its discovery was announced in 2002. According to the park, it is "remarkably intact with the unique design features and structural modifications still visible."

For reasons of safety and protection of the historic bomber, the site is "closed to SCUBA and all forms of underwater diving unless a permit has been issued by the Chief Ranger's office." The combination of the depth of the wreck and the cold water make the location too risky for most recreational divers. Visits to the bottom at this depth are classified as "technical dives," and require special equipment and training.

At various times in recent years, commercial dive operators have held a Commercial Use Authorization (CUA) to conduct guided technical scuba dives at the B-29 site, but no such agreements are currently in place.

According to park spokesman Andrew Muñoz, a prospectus for a new CUA is currently undergoing review, and is expected to be advertised for open bidding early next year. If a new CUA is issued, private divers will once again be able to visit the site.

Lest collectors be tempted to attempt something foolish, it should be noted that all known artifacts from the wreck are now in safekeeping in the park's museum collection.

Lake Mead National Recreation Area has been legally designated as "custodian of the B29 Superfortress Bomber and all its appurtenances."